A few years ago I did a free trial of Newspapers.com. It just didn’t dazzle me. I didn’t find much and seemed to exhaust what it had on day two of the trial so I cancelled.
Well.
Their collection has grown of course. And they offered special pricing at RootsTech so I decided to give it another try. I spent some time yesterday looking for some things and found oodles of goodies. That article up there is about my great grand aunt Dolores. Apparently she decided to run away from home for a bit of fun when she was 15 and it made the papers.
Congrats on your finds. Rather exciting to find a juvenile runaway in your tree! No favorite newspaper website for me as I haven’t used any very much. Curious to hear from others tho.
Thank you. I was pretty surprised to find this. Lots of color with Dolores. 😉
Do you think it’s worth subscribing to now? I’ve hesitated since I’m so pleased with what’s available at the Library of Congress and The Brooklyn Public Library. Your Great Aunt must’ve found the work enjoyable to say it was fun. Picking prunes sounds like work! I wonder if the allure of making some spending money drew them to go to Roseburg?
Well, I’ve only used it for a grand total of about 2 hours so far because I’ve been busy preparing for some classes I’m teaching next week. But those two hours were completely full of discoveries. I feel like their tools are more dynamic than they used to be so that is definitely a plus. So far so good. Of course it was $40 for the year so I don’t feel as much pressure for it to dazzle me but it has already surpassed what I was expecting. My great aunt was a bit of a trouble maker. She went to prison for about a year for grand larceny. She and her brother were like a milder version of Bonnie and Clyde in Washington State. She grew up working on a homestead in Alaska and then in rural Vancouver, CS so picking prunes was probably more about enjoying the sunshine and eating while chatting with a friend.
I have had amazing luck on both newspapers.com and genealogybank.com. It depends on the location and the years. Newspapers.com now has an upgrade that includes many more recent newspapers; before it was only papers up to 1922. Genealogybank is valuable for finding recent obituaries that are not available on newspapers.com I subscribe to both and use them both all the time. There’s nothing like a newspaper story to bring life to our ancestors’ stories, as your example above does so colorfully!
I love Genealogybank too. I’ve found some great stuff on there. I agree, newspapers add color.
I’ve had good luck on Newspapers.Com and The Library of Congress website. Congrats on your finds!
Thank you! I haven’t tried the Library of Congress website. I’ll have to give that a try. 🙂
Genealogy bank is my favorite right now because it’s search functions are the tightest and they have an extensive library of the places I’m researching right now. Find my past has some newspapers I needed too, but that program doesn’t highlight text to show you your search words on the page. Which means you have to read the entire page to find the hit.
I love GenealogyBank too! I haven’t used the newspapers on FindMyPast very much. It makes me a little crazy to have to read the whole page…